ADWEA deal to lead to desalination expansion for the north

ADWEA and a partner agree to boost water output of a plant in Fujairah.

The Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA) and a foreign partner agreed yesterday to boost the water output of a desalination plant in Fujairah by 30 per cent to meet growing demand in the Northern Emirates. The expansion is expected to come online in 2013. The US$200 million (Dh734m) investment in new filtration technology will provide the capacity to produce 136 million litres of potable water a day from seawater. The new capacity will be built at the existing Fujairah power station, which already produces 455 million litres of water a day and 893 megawatts of electricity.

The water will be sold to an ADWEA subsidiary in a 20-year deal, said ADWEA'S partner Sembcorp, a Singaporean firm that owns 40 per cent of the plant. The new facility will use reverse osmosis, which is more energy-efficient than the dominant technology in the UAE - multistage flash, which uses waste heat from power plants to distil fresh water from seawater. ADWEA, which controls all new power and water supplies for Fujairah, Ras al Khaimah, Umm al Qaiwain and Ajman, expects to increase water supplies to the region by 60 per cent by 2014, according to its official forecast.

It is separately building the Fujairah F2 power station, which is expected to come online by the end of the year, producing 2,000mw of power and 590 million litres of water a day. [e-mail]